🧭 Simple guiding words for 2025
Personal Strategy #49 - Strategic thinking applied to your life.
The two guiding words of 2024 - joy and flow - have served me well, enjoying a year with good flow across all areas of activity.
It’s been a year lived without the burden of quantified objectives, yet with intention and direction.
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This year i’m experimenting with some changes when it comes to using guiding words:
I’m picking 4 instead of 2
Two words have limited interactions, like for example: joy and flow, joy without flow, flow without joy, no joy and no flow, joy followed by flow, flow followed by joy
I’m curious how the interactions between four words will feel like
The new 4 words are inspired less by my guiding principles and more by what recently crystallized in a flash of inspiration
These words are:
Energy ⚡️
Depth ⚓️
Posts 📢
(Inner) Circle 🔘
How will they combine in guiding my actions?
How will the tensions between them play out in real life?
Will i keep all of them throughout the year?
Will joy and flow stay in the background or fade away as guiding words?
Time will tell - the only thing that i know now is that i’ve started the year with a very good energy (partly) thanks to these 4 words 🙏
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I’m playing with a seasonal guiding word as well
Inspired by the Seasons & Personal Strategy insight, i’ll be adding a specific guiding word for each season:
During winter: Create ✨
During spring: Launch 🚀
During summer: Connect 🔗
During autumn: Scale 🏗️
And a contextual guiding word
Why not also sprinkle some contextual guiding words extracted from the essence of my personal strategy for specific contexts. For writing newsletters, the guiding word is River 〰️
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So while writing newsletters in January-February 2025 my guiding words are:
Energy ⚡️
Depth ⚓️
Posts 📢
(Inner) Circle 🔘
Create ✨
River 〰️
Feels right. Let’s go! ⚡️-⚓️-📢-🔘-✨-〰️
If you could pick some words to guide you in 2025, what would they be?
Enjoy the new chapter of your yearly book,
Bülent
As we’re all navigating through the uncertainty of life, in the Personal Strategy series i’m exploring and playing with strategy concepts and practices applied to personal and professional contexts.
If you want to suggest specific topics or questions related to personal strategy, you can reach me on LinkedIn.
Creator of the series: Bülent Duagi, strategy adviser for CEOs in Tech.